Rikyu and Wabi-style kaiseki

First, what is kaiseki? In short, it is a meal that host prepares by himself/herself for the guests to enjoy before proceeding to a tea drinking. When the Tea tradition just came to Japan, kaiseki that has been served before tea gatherings consisted of many kinds of different foods. Guests were having a huge party. To illustrate it you can read a following poem traditionally attributed to Soami (d.1525), which is found in the Choka Chanoyu Monogatari [Tea stories in Long-verse style]. Soami was a cultural advisor to the Muromachi shogun.

 Now they get down to the meal.

Raw fish, chicken, and everything else.

They lift the lids with haste,

And grab with bare hands

The raw-smelling dishes,

These overindulgent, gluttonous people.

The beautifully laid out dishes

They turn upside-down and spill around.

They even crunch on the bones,

Mixing many things in their mouths,

Using their chopsticks in the wrong way.

Their chatter is mingled with songs,

They prattle about the most trivial subjects;

Their voices rise as they compete,

Each pretending to know everything.

They take no note of prearranged times.

Lifting up the large sake cups,

They force themselves to drink 

Much more than they are capable of,

Till their behavior becomes undignified.

You can see that Tea gatherings were not always the way we know it now. Rikyu did his best to transform the Way of Tea into a spiritual practice, in a wabi style.

From an article " From kaiseki to kaiseki: The development of Formal Tea Cuisine":

"One winter morning Sen Doan (1546-1607) invited his father, Sen Rikyu (1522-1591), to attend a snow-viewing tea. When Rikyu arrived he glanced into the front garden and saw Doan, wearing a straw raincoat and a sedge hat. Doan had been gathering vegetables in a nearby field and was just returning home.

When the meal trays were carried into the tearoom and Rikyu - in pleasurable anticipation of banishing the early-morning cold - removed the lid from his soup bowl, he found that the bowl contained sea bass and some greens. However, sea bass was out of season, and therefore scarce and expensive. Rikyu had been wondering about Doan's plans for the meal ever since he had glimpsed him returning from the field, and the chilly mood created by the soup was very disappointing to him. He chided his son for his lack of sensibility, emphasized that the cuisine for tea in wabi-soan (simple and unpretentious "grass hut") was first and foremost a matter of doing one's best to convey the atmosphere of wabi, and certainly not of serving rare delicacies. For Rikyu the ideal kaiseki, or "tea cuisine", was a simple cuisine using ordinary ingredients; a "down-to-earth" kind of meal."

Kaiseki  that our class has prepared once for a tea gathering; fried squid and pieces of avocado.

  

Introduction to Sen no Rikyu's Hundred Verses (translated by Gretchen Mittwer) part 1

Dear, Tea lovers!!!

here I want to introduce a 100 Rikyu's verses, that are basically a set of rules for the way of Tea. As I started learning the way of tea (in Seoul Urasenke School, Korea), I was eager to know more about it from what the founder himself was teaching. And his poems was what I have found. Here I want to present Rikyu's verses one by one, and write my understanding of it.  

(Note: as I am copying these verses from the book "Sen Genshitsu talks about The Enjoyment of Tea" by Sen Genshitsu, Urasenke Grand Master XV, and as I don't know Japanese, while writing down the Japanese version I might make some mistakes. Mismatches with book will be marked in red. For this reason please don't print this poem as original. If there is no red marking in the poem, it might mean that I was successful in finding the correct spelling. But my future plan is to correct all the mistakes when checking it with my Japanese friends.) 

The first verse goes as follows:

1. Sono michi ni iran to omou kokoro koso

    Waga mi nagara no shisho narikere.

  その道に入らんと思ふ心こそ

  我が身ながらの師匠なりけれ

   To have the mind to enter this path is,

   Indeed, to have an inherent teacher.

My insight: 

The way I understand this verse is: having desire to study the way of Tea means that I have an inner teacher who can guide me. Now my mind goes in two direction, gives me two main thoughts. One - only the one who wants to learn can be on this road. If one doesn't want, there is no way that one would find oneself following this way. And the second thought - no matter how good teacher we might have, in the end acquired  amount and value of knowledge will depend only on us. Because the knowledge on this way can't be evaluated by any kind of test, or proven by any kind of certificate. The level of mastery is the the ultimate change of the life quality. Our internal world is in our own hands. Our perfection is our own responsibility. In the end it is me who is walking this way...

A bit of History

From a book "Japan: The story of a nation" by Edwin O. Reischauer (served as US ambassador to Japan from 1961 to 1966), p.71-72:

"The medieval Zen monks also brought from China three other arts which in time became so characteristic of Japanese culture that they are now considered to be typically Japanese. One was flower arrangement, which started with the placing of floral offerings before representations of Buddhist deities, but eventually became a fine art which is now part of the training of well-bred Japanese girl. The second was landscape gardening, in which, in contrast to the formal, geometric gardens of the West, the Ashikaga masters tried to create in a restricted space a small replica of the mountains, forests, and waters of nature itself, sometimes in close verisimilitude but sometimes only symbolically, as in the rock garden of the Ryoanji in Kyoto, which is composed only  of the rocks and sand. (The works of these Ashikaga masters made Kyoto the word Mecca if landscape gardening.) The third was the tea ceremony, a rite in which a beautiful but simple setting; a few fine pieces of old pottery; a slow, formalized, extremely graceful ritual for preparing and serving the tea; and a spirit of complete tranquility all combined to express the love of beauty, the devotion to simplicity, and the search for spiritual calm which characterized the best of Zen.

All three of these arts, as well as monochrome landscape painting, shared a common esthetic idiom. They were close to nature and rejected artificial, man-made patterns of regularity; they showed a deep love of simplicity; and they displayed a disciplined cultivation of the essence - the handful of blossoms or branches in a flower arrangement, the simple instruments and spare movements of the tea ceremony, the restricted space and sometimes austere design of the gardens, the few but bold lines of paintings that suggested sweeping landscapes and vast cosmic powers. It was an esthetics which cultivation that the feudal Japanese had derived from Zen and the warrior ethos. It was also an esthetics peculiarly suited to the relative simplicity and  poverty of medieval Japan. It is interesting that it has proved in recent years to have worldwide appeal in our own more complex and affluent age."